Into the Night

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was born in New York City on December 4, 1903, to parents whose marriage collapsed in his youth. He spent much of his childhood in Mexico with his father, a civil engineer. When he was eight, his maternal grandfather took him to Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts to see a traveling French company perform Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. The experience gave the young Woolrich his first insight into color and drama, and his first sense of tragedy. Three years later, on a night when he looked up at the low-hanging stars from the valley of Anahuac, he understood that someday, like Cio-Cio-San, he too would have to die. From that moment on he was haunted by a sense of doom. “I had that trapped feeling,” he wrote in his unfinished autobiography, “like some sort of a poor insect that you’ve put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can’t, and it can’t, and it can’t.”

During his adolescence he lived with his mother and aunt and maternal grandfather in the grandfather’s ornate house on 113th Street, near Morningside Park, a short walk from Columbia University. In 1921 he entered Columbia College as a journalism major, with his father paying the tuition from Mexico City. During a protracted illness in his junior year he began experimenting with writing fiction, scrawling the first draft of a novel in pencil on sheets of loose yellow paper that he scrounged from around the house. From the beginning he was a rapid, white-heat writer. “The stream of words was like an electric arc leaping across the intervening space from pole to opposite pole, from me to paper... It was tiring and it wouldn’t let go... You couldn’t stop it, it had to stop by itself. Then it fizzled out again at last, as unpredictably as it had begun. It left me feeling spent...”

By the time he was well enough to return to school he’d become a writing addict. Every evening from nine until midnight he’d sit in a second-floor room and scribble furiously — the door closed, the family out of hearing, a Burmese elephant-head lamp lit on a pedestal in the corner behind him. By late spring of 1924 the first draft of his first novel was done, and he borrowed a friend’s typewriter to turn it into readable form. When the novel found a publisher, Woolrich quit Columbia to pursue his dream of bright lights, gay music, and a meteoric literary career like that of his whole generation’s cultural idol, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Woolrich’s early mainstream fiction is saturated with the Fitzgerald influence, especially the first novel, Cover Charge (1926). It chronicles the lives and loves of the Jazz Age’s gilded youth — the child-people, flitting from thrill to thrill, conversing in a mannered slang which, sixty years later, reads like the gibberings of creatures from another galaxy. But if nothing else, the novel is eerily prophetic in the way its protagonist’s fate foreshadows its author’s. Ballroom dancer Alan Walker winds up alone, in a cheap hotel room, his legs all but useless after a drunken auto smash-up, abandoned by all the women he loved, contemplating suicide. “I hate the world,” he cries out. “Everything comes into it so clean and goes out so dirty.”

This debut novel was followed by Children of the Ritz (1927), a frothy concoction about a spoiled heiress’s marriage to her chauffeur, which won Woolrich a $10,000 prize and a contract from First National Pictures for the movie rights. He was invited to Hollywood to help with the adaptation and stayed on as a staff writer. Besides his movie chores (for which he never received screen credit) and an occasional story or article for magazines like College Humor and Smart Set, he completed three more novels during these years. Early in 1931, after a brief, inexplicable and disastrous marriage to a producer’s daughter, Woolrich fled back to Manhattan and his mother. His last mainstream novel, Manhattan Love Song (1932), anticipates the motifs of his later fiction with its love-struck young couple cursed by a malignant fate which leaves one dead and the other desolate.

Over the next two years he became one more victim of the Depression. He sold next to nothing and was soon deep in debt, reduced to sneaking into movie palaces by the fire doors for his entertainment. What he didn’t know was that he was on the brink of a new creative life, that he was about to become the foremost suspense writer of all time.